Publications

BOOKS

Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are currently returning to the forefront of the political scene? In this book, Nidesh Lawtoo considers Donald Trump as a case study to illustrate Nietzsche’s untimely claim that, one day, “ ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, will be the real masters.” In the process, Lawtoo joins forces with a genealogy of mimetic theorists—from Plato to Nietzsche, via Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Bataille, Girard, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy—to show that (new) fascism may not be fully “new,” let alone original; yet it effectively reloads the old problematics of mimesis via new media that have the disquieting power to turn politics itself into a fiction.

Review

“A penetrating investigation of neofascist leaders’ power to trigger mimetic contagion among enthusiastic crowds, both in Europe and in the United States, Nidesh Lawtoo’s insightful book reframes fundamental concepts of our political tradition in light of current mass-mediated forms of communication and hypermimetic strategies of mythologization.”
—Adriana Cavarero, Professor Emeritus, Political Philosophy, University of Verona, and author of Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude

SPECIAL ISSUES

This special issue of Modern Language Notes rethinks the relation between “poetics and politics, poétique et politique” in the company of the French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Including articles from major figures in continental philosophy (Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou), political theory (Jane Bennett), as well as from plural voices in French, German, and North American literary theory and criticism, contributors join perspectives that are usually split in different areas of investigation in order to reframe an ancient concept located at the juncture between poetics and politics, literature and philosophy: namely, mimēsis. In the process the issue casts new light on foundational mimetic concepts such as myth, sympathy, identification, figura, and plasticity in order to address the growing shadows cast by the contemporary fictions of the political.